{"id":667,"date":"2013-07-02T16:17:19","date_gmt":"2013-07-02T14:17:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=667"},"modified":"2013-07-02T16:17:19","modified_gmt":"2013-07-02T14:17:19","slug":"unwriting-editing-tayloring-pruning-fitting-the-word-count","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2013\/07\/02\/unwriting-editing-tayloring-pruning-fitting-the-word-count\/","title":{"rendered":"UNWRITING, EDITING, TAYLORING, PRUNING…: FITTING THE WORD COUNT <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

English is an infinitely flexible language and so, the word \u2018unwrite\u2019 does exist. Oxford Online ignores it but not Merriam-Webster: \u201cto obliterate from writing: expunge, rescind\u201d. I have also comes across an article by learned Laurence Lerner, \u201cUnwriting Literature\u201d (New Literary History<\/em>, 22: 3, Summer 1991, 795-815) and an article in, of all places, The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, by Karen Blumenthal. She is the one that uses the verb in the sense I mean \u2013more or less. <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t mean by \u2018unwrite\u2019 the effort made at having to \u201crip out my work to fix mistakes\u201d as she does in her embroidery and her young adult fiction, but rather the need to cut off from one\u2019s work that for which there is no room. She means cases that have to do with expunging material that is not strictly needed for the internal coherence of the text; I mean rather, having to cut material that makes perfect sense but that can\u2019t fit the pre-given word count I need to respect. In both cases, yes, \u201cthanks to unwriting, days of work became a mere 10 lines of text.\u201d Or less.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the particular case that has been driven me bananas in the last few months. The research group I belong to, \u2018Constructing New Masculinities\u2019 (http:\/\/www.ub.edu\/masculinities\/<\/a>) is working on a volume on alternative masculinities, Moving Ahead<\/em>, about which I am truly excited. I decided to contribute a chapter on Orson Scott Card\u2019s hero Andrew \u2018Ender\u2019 Wiggins, of whom you\u2019ll hear plenty when Gavin Hood\u2019s film adaptation of Ender\u2019s Game<\/em> hits the screen in November (if you\u2019re an SF fan, of course you know Ender!). <\/p>\n

Now, Ender appears in many, many texts since the Enderverse is a multimedia megatext in constant expansion \u2013I focused on \u2018just\u2019 five novels: Ender\u2019s Game, Ender in Exile, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide <\/em>and Children of the Mind<\/em>. The notes alone occupied thirty pages, the first draft 16,000 words. Here\u2019s the corner I painted myself into very naively: I\u2019m only allowed 4,800 words as there are many other contributors to the book (logically!). After gruelling pruning of the branches that needn\u2019t be there, my article is now at 4,825 words, ready for a last thorough unwriting.<\/p>\n

To be honest, it\u2019s a better article than the 16,000 word version and, incredibly, I argue more or less the same points. I have sweated out, however, every single sentence, happy that English can accommodate so much meaning in its synthetic nature (no way you can do that in circumlocutious Spanish). I haven\u2019t passed the article yet onto trusted readers, so I have no idea whether it works but I hope it does (I had to summarise five novels, remember, while I argued that patriarchal Card quashes Ender\u2019s atypical masculinity to prevent it from becoming a real alternative). <\/p>\n

In the good old times, you could write as much as you wanted for instance in your PhD dissertation \u2013mine, on monstrosity, is itself a monster at almost 600 pages. Last week a doctoral student of mine was told that any manuscript over 250 pages runs the risk of remaining unpublished as, apparently, costs double past that mark. She is aiming for 400 pages at the last count, against my injunction not to write more than 350. Articles of 10,000 words are now a rarity and, let\u2019s be honest about this, a trial for our patience. So, yes, 4,800 sounds about right, just as 2,500 is the perfect measure for conference papers. In our rushed times, our attention span is fast dwindling \u2013Twitter will kill it off for good…<\/p>\n

What kills me<\/em> is that to reach the 2,500 or the 4,800, even in \u2018simple\u2019 cases which \u2018just\u2019 one text under analysis, I usually must write four times more and then spend weeks agonizing about how to reduce my big trees down to bonsai size. I unwrite, as you can see, much more than I write (except here, thankfully…). Now, English lacks the very colourful Spanish verb \u2018jibarizar\u2019, which I first heard philosopher Antonio Marina use, and which is exactly what I must do to my articles \u2013this is why as I unwrite I think of bizarre mummified heads (and of bonsais, certainly).<\/p>\n

What is the recipe? The first thing to go is the bibliography you only mention (see Smith 2009) but that, anyway, you spent time reading, underlining and assimilating. Use as few quotations as possible, which is hard in our times of sprawling bibliography, and as short as reasonable. Second, off with the footnotes \u2013none will learn from my article that Card based the abusive relationship between Ender and his brother Peter on his own with elder brother Ray (this was a hard one to let go). Third, one can always be less loquacious and communicate the same ideas in fewer words, from 10% to 50% (less than that and you sound too hard-boiled!!).<\/p>\n

Ironically, I agree with Laura Pallar\u00e9s, an ex-student interested in writing the first PhD dissertation ever on Card (if she can afford UAB\u2019s fees…), that Ender is enough to fill in not one but several dissertations, of 250 pages and even longer. <\/p>\n

So, there we are: size matters after all.<\/p>\n

Comments are very welcome! (Thanks!) Just remember that I check them first for spam; it might take a few days for yours to be available. If you like my blog, you can subscribe using the RSS feed (right-hand column, below Blogroll.) You\u2019ll get an email message for every new post. VISIT MY WEB: http:\/\/gent.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/
\n<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

English is an infinitely flexible language and so, the word \u2018unwrite\u2019 does exist. Oxford Online ignores it but not Merriam-Webster: \u201cto obliterate from writing: expunge, rescind\u201d. I have also comes across an article by learned Laurence Lerner, \u201cUnwriting Literature\u201d (New Literary History, 22: 3, Summer 1991, 795-815) and an article in, of all places, The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,31],"tags":[408],"class_list":["post-667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post-graduate","category-science-fiction","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}